skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I am seeing many anecdotal experiences shared online on various platforms stating that it is difficult to find employment in tech."

What is "tech"

100% serious question

Is it short for "technology"

For example,

"Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way."

Skolnikoff, Eugene B. (1993). "The Setting". The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology, and the Evolution of International Politics. Princeton University Press. p. 13. ISBN 0-691-08631-1. JSTOR j.ctt7rpm1. Citing Harvey Brooks' definition of technology as "knowledge of how to fulfill certain human purposes in a specifiable and reproducible way."

The term "technology", historically, is not synonymous with computers despite whatever popular usage has arisen in the past ~20 years.

Technology predates the existence and use of computers and computer networks and the use of these resources for commercial surveillance

Knowledge of computers and computer newtorks is a type of conceptual knowledge

Electronic surveillance, data collection from internet usage and delivery of advertising via internet is a practical goal

The application of conceptual knowledge of computers and computer networks to the practical goal of surveillance, data collection and advertising is reproducible

However it should be self-evident that "technology" is much broader than this type of application

Most technology has nothing to do with internet surveillance or advertising
Might teenagers feel less isolated if they had family around though? I grew up with tons of cousins my age and that was always a part of my social life. Doesn’t matter that I wasn’t 18
Vienna was an international city; and Mozart and Shickhander were seeking international fame. The Magic Flute was a relatively low-brow 'singspiel' in the native language but its creators wanted foreigners to be able to see it and like it. (It was common for the wealthy and educated to speak many languages, not necessarily very well.) In music history you see critics criticize some operas for being difficult to understand, and remarking if the audience seemed lost.

International audiences nonwithstanding, it's just hard for many people to hear song lyrics, and a very common choice to make song lyrics simple, and hearing lyrics is critical for opera in a way it isn't if you're singing Goethe at a small salon concert.

The original point is it's silly to compare opera lyrics to spoken dialogue. Songs with belabored and repetitive lyrics can easily be interesting, spoken word with this property is banal.
To me, that's just reaching. Fight or flight is a thing. Not everyone is going to fight. Just face, generally, it's not a cost thing, it's a "they're not a fighter" thing.
As long as the interviewee also reports to work with their anal AI interface, what's the problem ?
A bright spot.

> One bright spot was a decline in the number of unhoused veterans. This year that actually fell to a record low, after years of intense investment in subsidized housing and support services.

That decline was due to someone caring about the issue; planning, financing, and executing. But mostly, because someone cared about actually addressing the issue.
Cold and services are both covered in the article. Here's the section on 'policy' (shelters and such)

https://www.noahpinion.blog/i/106265050/claim-homelessness-i...
San Francisco's 'war on cars' gets even more intense as threats of violence fly
Bunch of services that can do captchas now. It’d maybe lessen the load on employers but then job seeking becomes pay to play. The candidate who can afford one of those services + automation beats out those who can’t. It’s already an arms race of sorts.
Almost everyone that uses VSCode don't care that much about the editor. They just want something to do the job. Most of the plugins are just glue code for integrations, not a true UX improvements for your workflow. Compare that to to Emacs and (Neo)Vim where all the plugins are about improving your workflows.
Being visually impaired, I love the independence that the public transport network in Central Europe gives me. I live in the Netherlands, and frequently visit my parents in Belgium. I've also visited friends in Germany, all without relying on a sighted companion for transportation.
This is wrong - search any major city and “blocked development” and you’ll see.
Every large tech company only survives because of H1b labor.
Seating rail cars have 70-90 seats, whereas couchettes have 40-66 beds, but at lower emissions (lower speed->less drag) and higher occupancy (in Germany, occupancy is around 50% for day trains). It’s pretty much a wash. If you mean luxury sleepers, they’re worse sure. None of the startups are really targeting those luxury/low density levels, because of the overall poor impact.

Flying has around 10x the co2eq emissions of trains (300g/km, including infrastructure, occupancy). Cars are still pretty bad, but also don’t compete well for 1000km trips in Europe. It’s basically only aviation at those distances.

Electric airplanes that can do 1000km trips don’t exist. They may exist one day in significant quantities… but perhaps only after we’ve used up all our carbon budget on the path to a 2-3C increase.
Eh. Software is full of cliches and idioms. I shouldn’t be writing my own logging library and I sure as fuck shouldn’t be writing my own security library.

Also don’t write your own billing system unless you’re a finance company.
2 years been looking, didn't help that I only found out I have ASD which was probably costing me many jobs without realization. But yea, market sucks and we hired someone to come in and cut costs.
Even if you get rid of all rental housing, the housing market will crash sure, but the labor market will crash at the same time. So that doesn’t help so much in the short term. Ok, when the labor market comes back, we still have N houses but not everyone can afford those houses, the bank holds them and eventually they fall apart due to maintenance issues (why buffalo NY has a housing shortage even though it has half the population it used to). So maybe we can solve them by just giving the houses away to people, I guess? Can they afford to maintain them? Since the market is inflexible, why should anyone build new ones?
> Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them.

Tell that to Microsoft. Although their products have telemetry, they become shittier every day.
Policy, The Koch Brothers and "eminent domain" problems in the US.
It's not just you.

I have an Ivy league degree, worked in deep learning since alexnet at a leading startup in the space, was a CTO of a startup that got acquired and have referrals from very senior people at the top FANG companies and still struggled to get interviews.

I also have research scientist friends with Neurips papers, ones that solved long standing open math problems and even they are struggling to get hired.

What me and my friends heard from a lot of people at the large companies was that many of them are no longer hiring in the US, but in India, Poland and Brazil instead, and that the roles they have listed in the US are for internal transfers. I've had a referral for Google for months and did not get an interview for NYC based roles, but when I went to an ML conference in Warsaw a few months ago I learned that Google is looking to hire 2000 people there, but with people in that office making ~1/4th of my friends in the US.

On top of that you have a huge pool of bootcamp grads and foreign applicants so any role posted gets 1000s of applications in the first few hours, making it impossible for recruiters to look over all of them.

And if that wasn't enough we're going through a huge hiring downturn post the COVID bump, see: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
Subsidized housing doesn’t address the issue except for small interest groups. It just puts a bandaid on it.
You can (except for Germany I think, that stopped accepting the tickets issued from international tariff book few years ago), but this will get you the base price, without any possible discounts, so is usually way more expensive than tickets bought directly. But gives you tickets with date change/cancellation possible.
35, male, American citizen. applied to 800 jobs, few technical interviews, no offers. i believe with the advent of AI, the landscape has changed faster than the job market has corrected for it. It will never go back to the glory days of tech people getting hired, its over.
And who is going to find or even care about these websites except for people going to them specifically because of a link to your profile on social media sites, through public talks or otherwise through word of mouth?
10 to 30 minutes isn't nearly enough time. In my country, when someone is hit by a train, that train is stopped on track and is only allowed to continue after it is fully cleaned up. The train company can't risk rolling into a crowded station when the front of the train still shows evidence of an impact such as having blood on it.

Sometimes the front locomitive gets uncoupled earlier so the train can continue on a different track. But the rule is that passengers in the train should not be exposed to what happened outside the train. It's bad enough that the machinist had to witness it.
Here's what I did:

- I wrote down my goals, equipment, and past workout history.

- Then I asked ChatGPT to generate a P/P/L workouts around that, in 8 separate chat instances

- I then wrote another prompt for a fitness expert adjudicator and asked it to compare two of the workouts, determine their strengths and weaknesses (based on above goals), and develop a third workout based on the strengths of the two provided

- I ran this in "tournament style" for all 8 workouts with three brackets. This ended up converging into an optimal workout

I actually took this final workout to my personal trainer and he said it was perfect for my goals and wouldn't change anything. I've been running it for 3 months now and I am quite happy.
Making a simple HTTP webserver in C
Low pay offers.

In Montreal there are plenty of offers paying ~90k CAD/year ( 62k USD/year ) for 15+ years of experience.

There are lot of job listings in Montreal, and those positions are real. Problem is that the pay makes those positions undesirable.

The second problem is that no one hires junior developers. My friend's kid finishing CS studies in May 2025 and prospect for jobs are not good.
I’ve done monorepo, separate compilation units before. It has its own set of issues but it cuts down on circular dependencies and makes more sense than having sixty repositories checked out. Those are hell.
I’ve tried twice to make the move to VS Code and keep coming back to Emacs. I would often be overwhelmed by my obsession to tweak things (ADHD..) but switching to Doom Emacs and sticking to the standard config helped with that. Learning some Elisp to write custom functions and embracing org-mode has made it near impossible to switch to another editor now.
TI has had wifi+bluetooth microcontrollers for almost a decade now, and you get a cortex m4.
I've had numerous people contact me directly with follow up questions about various info I've put on my website. Many of those have turned into further conversations and collaborations.

You can't have that if Google is plagiarizing your site and delivering the info.
Landing the plane is a good thing.

Landing the plane by going nose-down into the ground is not.
> Most technology has nothing to do with internet surveillance or advertising

Yes, but what people want is to make money applying technology, and most of that does in fact have something to do with surveillance and advertising.

This is because control-over-other-people stands out as something which there will always be demand for. Everything else gets easier to supply as technology improves.
This is terrific, thank you for sharing!
I think the search and ad code base may not be explicitly co-mingled, but they are implicitly co-mingled. And return worse search results than the early 2000s code base.
My company is hiring in ML, the position is remote, can you send me your resume?
I'll agree with a lot of his critiques, but one of his small ones that surprisingly echoed a lot of frustration was the dictum to prefer small definitions.

> Quoting Chuck Moore:

> Forth is highly factored code. I don't know anything else to say except that Forth is definitions. If you have a lot of small definitions you are writing Forth. In order to write a lot of small definitions you have to have a stack.

It seemed like apologetics and a making a virtue out of necessity, given the fact that I don't have the capability to do stack acrobatics in my head live. The only way to be able to read a function in my head, without taking a pencil to paper _was_ small functions. But I found that clashed with the ways some algorithms and procedures naturally expressed themselves in longer multi-step style, and actually ending up being more verbose and tangled with multiple top-level definitions.

It turns out that local variables that compile to C-style indirect (SP + i) accesses are only mildly more expensive than stack acrobatics, but still gave the flexibility of Forth-style metaprogramming. [1]

Ultimately, the author's points about the "Forth philosophy" but not Forth-the-language itself (and extremely spare code) ring true to me.

Given my limitations, life is too short to work to have as minimalist an implementation as you'd like, and to desire to have a interactive development environment in <128k. For me, it's hard enough to implement the "subject" that I'm programming algorithmically/data-driven-ly/amortizing-computation-ly efficiently.

[1] https://www.novabbs.com/devel/article-flat.php?id=26347&grou...
> some sort of region based information can help correlate whether there is a particular problem that might happen at far higher rates in hilly terrain or specific humidity levels.

You know what will help in those situations ? Testing.

It is expensive, i know. Why not skip it and just analyse the KPIs from the telemetry. /s
> Which is obviously dangerous advice.

Same advice as my trainer gives me.
Maybe not your company, but it seems hiring companies brought this upon themselves with immediate AI rejects of qualified candidates, ghost jobs, ghosting candidates after interview, etc, etc.

If it takes a qualified candidate 100's of applications to land a single interview, then can you blame someone for automating it? I'd say that having the initiative and ability to automate it well would make this guy a great hire, if he hadn't already found a job!
I don't see the problem with the answer, and the question is already garbage. Plus, the LLM hedges its advice with precautions.

I get a pretty good summary when I paste the question into Google. It comes up with a ballpark but also gives precautions and info on how to estimate what caloric restriction makes sense for you within the first 3 sentences.

And all in a format someone is likely to read instead of clicking on some verbose search result that only answers the question if they read a whole article which they aren't going to do.

This seems like really lame nit picking. And I don't think it passes the "compared to what?" test.
Laws are for participants who willingly obey them. If they don't they automatically shouldn't be covered by them. There might be separate subset of laws on how to treat them but they cannot be treated the same as conforming entities.

You have freedom but if you do a crime your right to freedom is void. Now you have right to get punished.
Agree with everything you wrote, with one small caveat: the "white male" thing is really only a notable disadvantage with large companies. Every startup I've interacted with has always prioritized hiring the person who is most capable of doing the job... the extra race/gender variable really only comes into play when there's a substantial HR layer involved.

But to your other point, I think any perceived layoffs of white males at tech companies is just correlation with their overrepresentation in the software engineer population.
> I'm the opposite of woke

What exactly do you think that word means?
> Format the response as a JSON object with these keys:{ "status": "success" or "error", ...

Would it not be better to ask the LLM to generate the status key last, since it cannot know ahead of generation whether the generation will actually be successful?
It's time to leave the leap second in the past
Yeah, a lot of people here hate this but the few jobs I've gotten in the past 25 years or so were always directly through people I knew. The resume was pretty much pro forma.

But, yeah, if you don't have a network you're in a more difficult position.
And how likely is someone to find your site through search instead of word of mouth?

I bet you if you had insightful posts on HN (not saying you don’t) and people knew you, you would get more traffic by putting a link in your profile here than people searching on Google.
Nostromo UI Themes
> Give Ukraine a couple hundred longer-range missiles

I think the main worry is that Putin will start using tactical nukes, they already changed their policy about that.
when you look at who is absent at the professional level there's a theme. where are all the high agency operators?

I've spent most of my career contracting and consulting for institutions and the reason I was able to do it was because those institutions had social/diversity hiring mandates that created a huge market for people like me to actually deliver the work while not being a part of the permanent organization. they could all sit in meetings being weird and passive aggressive with each other while I just solved and built stuff. it's been a good run, but the broader economic effects of that trend are becoming unavoidable.

What's changed since the 90's is there is no longer a path from tech practitioner to executive class in any org larger than a startup. the real value of H1-B's is they make up for the conflict-avoidant agreeableness of managers as companies grow larger and become more like institutions, where the effective indenture arrangement means H-1B's have to be supple enough for uncharismatic people to manage them. it's abuse, but it's an ancient dynamic. it would be great if markets de-globalized to where my cultural capital was currency again, but what to hope for and what to do are different things.

Don't look for employment, look for work. the culture and economy don't confer meaningful status from jobs anymore. it's gone, just get work for its own sake. Getting hung up on the racial issue or anything that makes you think in an inferior way or excuses a lack of agency is going to guarantee failure. Who cares what may be true, the only thing that matters is what you can effect.
I don't doubt the news article on this, but even with caffeine pills/powder it's near half a fistful to get to LD50 judging by my caffeine tablets. It's not impossible to consume, but it'd be distinctly unpleasant long before you get even anywhere close to dangerous levels.

For my high-caffeine pre-workout powder, I suspect I'd vomit long before I'd get anywhere near. Pure caffeine is less unpleasant, but still pretty awful, which I guess is why we don't see more deaths from it despite the widespread use.

I agree with you that there really ought to be caution around giving advice on safety-critical things, but this one really is right up there in freak accident territory, in the intersection of somewhat dangerous substances sold in a poorly regulated form (e.g. there's little reason for these to be sold as bulk powders instead of pressed into pills other than making people feel more macho downing awful tasting drinks instead of taking pills).
People are also leaving both of those states for places where housing is less affordable. So we have 100 houses for every 90 people in Mississippi because 20 people had already left the state for Atlanta, Nashville, or Austin.

Everyone knows that housing problems locally can be solved by making the places less desirable to live in. But it’s not a solution that anyone is interested in pursuing (rightfully so).
If you like him, try nerdrotic. Be mindful of their weird antiwoke MAGA bent though.
Have you tried turning your government off and back on again?
I believe at that point (huge blobs compared to small amounts of plaintext strings), it's easier to embed a universal binary web server and have it serve the contents of the zip, like https://redbean.dev/
Ask HN: Should a new programmer start with copilot?
Should novice programmers integrate AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot into their learning journey from the outset, or would this potentially undermine the development of essential programming skills including critical thinking and problem-solving abilities?

What is your opinion?
All the CEOs are investing money in AI and that budget has to come from somewhere. So we have reduced hiring.

The CEOs are scared that if AI ends up working, then they will be left behind by competitors who invested in AI. So every CEO must invest in AI according to game theory.
I haven’t seen the power of referrals for 10 years now. At work I can give you a “referral” by uploading your resume to our ATS. That’s it. It receives no more consideration than if you were to click Easy Apply on LinkedIn as far as I’m aware.
> genius toddler

I think it's closer to a well spoken idiot.
the problem isn’t someone’s intent (on purpose/by accident).

it’s intent (want to improve my gym performance so down a bunch of caffeine) combined with incorrect information gained from what is supposedly a trustworthy source (the limit presented is much higher than it actually is for humans).
When can we bring bulldozers to your block to start?

YIMBY’s get really angry when I suggest developing Dolores Park.
DNS Tapir
Language translation, object detection and segmentation for autonomous driving, surveillance, medical imaging... Indeed plenty fields where NNs are indispensable
in my opinion there is room for small and fast and large and slow but much smarter models. Use cases like phone keyboard autocomplete and next few words suggestion in coding or writing need very fast models that should by definition small. Very large models that are much smarter are also useful, for instance debugging issues or proofreading long letters.

Cursor really aced this. The Cursor model is very fast to suggest useful inline completions and then leaves big problems to big models.
Eye for an eye. Or better yet two eyes. Escalate boldly and actively till the bully backs off and maybe a bit more to make sure he's not faking.
It's ok if you don't like it. Good even. It being weird and not of mass appeal is part of the charm.
Delta apologizes – again – after another stowaway boards a flight without ticket
How many of those people found you by randomly searching Google versus via links via your profile on social media?
There are recruiting agencies who have tried this method: "Use AI to match the most relevant candidates to the job spec you gave us."

Spoiler alert, it doesn't work. The result is a mountain of overfitted garbage, with keyword spamming like there was no tomorrow. And they all find the same unqualified candidates.

If you're a recruiter, you're supposed to find the qualified, non-trivial to surface candidates. And yes, unfortunately that means it's a lot of hard work. (The top-notch agency recruiters value their personally built candidate networks for a good reason.)
I’d be absolutely fine going in person to interview for a remote job if I thought I had any reasonable chance of success with your process. We are talking about where I’m going to be working for at least the next few years. That’s kind of a big deal.
Have you seen an example where the AI hits on something that isn't in the first 10 pages of results?